Swindon, UK: Shearsman, 2025, 109pp.
One of the underlying structures of Jane Frank’s poems involves moving from a very detailed description of landscape – especially strong on precise colours – to the sudden insertion of a personal element. A reader might ask which of these two issues is the more important. The personal element is so ubiquitous in the poems of Gardening on Mars that it would be possible to read the poems as though all that material about the natural world were either a distraction, a masking, or an unconscious block. It’s not a reading that would sustain any sort of investigation though. The interaction between landscape and the fragmentarily established personal history of one of its inhabitants is part of the way the poems are built. In the first poem of Gardening on Mars – her second full length volume after Ghosts Struggle to Swim – we meet an additional factor which adds to the structural strength of the poems because the detailed description is followed by the gnomic assertion that “knowing so little can be a comfort”. This is taken up in the title of the second poem, “What We Don’t Know”. It’s an exciting and invigorating tension. On the one hand there is the detailed and precise description born of observation of the visual environment – it’s undoubtedly relevant that the poet’s father was an accomplished painter – and on the other, a recognition of how little in all this plenitude we actually understand. And this lack of knowledge includes things like the complex biological motivations of animals and insects but also what happened in our relationships and what happens inside our own personalities. And, added to this list of things we don’t understand, is the complex world of creativity itself: the writing of poems often turns up as a subject in the poems of this book. I stress these oppositions because, although Frank comes across as a very fluent poet, perhaps one who composes easily, the tensions between them prevent the poetry from being mere accomplished rhetoric made up of descriptions and assertions.
But it does mean that it is difficult to discuss this kind of poetry with its shifts and tensions without quoting entire poems. I’ll do my best with excerpts but, at the outset, I’ll quote one poem in full, choosing the second poem, “What We Don’t Know”, as a reasonably short example:
Abundance is everywhere, grassheads heavy with seed, millions of tiny discs shining on the surface of the lake like starbursts. In the shadows, at the edges, small brown ducks drift, smudges on ink on watery fingers. The house of poetry has walls in colours yet to be named: perhaps love is soft moss underfoot, without slipping, the deepest green? Dusk is the cool rich blue of pollinators after their day of creating. Cuckoos drift across speckled cloud, their sky path recorded on the surface. In the future, will their feathers be planted, grow in the soil? Will the horses that drank here have the faces of ferns? I’m eager for autumn’s quiet kindness after a year without seasons, of scorching heat. One day, we will look outwards together in the same direction so give words to me. I don’t want anything else in your absence.
It opens with a description of abundance, both of nature’s over-the-top natural fertility but also of the indescribable complexity of flowing water, a challenge that intrigues both physicists and mathematicians. Then the poem shifts immediately to two areas of uncertainty: poetry and love. I take the comment on the former to mean that although we have evolved subtle colour terms to deal with the world as visual experience we are woefully limited when it comes to describing poetry with the same precision. Then there is love brought into the last line so that the entire poem is seen as being written out of absence – one form, presumably, of what is not known. The fifth stanza introduces another dimension of our ignorance: an inability to see items in the light of their evolution. That is, to see them diachronically over spans of time that are so long they are opposed to our registration of what something is. This is a specific example of something which, in other poems, appears as a matter of dimension: a characteristic move in these poems, and something I’ll discuss later, is from micro-observations to a cosmic perspective.
There is a theoretical perspective behind this idea of what we don’t know. The word “sonder” appears in one of the poems of Ghosts Struggle to Swim and “Sonderings” from Gardening on Mars comments that it derives from a book by John Koenig where it encapsulates the vertiginous feeling that accompanies the realisation that, inside all the human beings one might see casually in passing, is a life as full and complex as one’s own:
. . . . . Cars are Pandora’s boxes: hold unknown languages, inventories of thought, sagas tunnelling through cities. This evening’s imaginings are eternities hidden in codes of headlight. . .
“Sonderings” would be an interesting poem to compare to Les Murray’s “Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver” where the car encourages solipsism – its driver doesn’t think about the contents of other cars passing by. A similar issue is taken up in “Through a Car Window” which speculates on what might be going on inside a woman seen from a passing car.
At any rate, “sondering” is a “what we don’t know” registered as an emotional rather than an intellectual experience. One of the issues that can limit poetry is its desire to explore the intensity of a particular moment, but counterbalancing this illumination is the fact that it isolates the individual and is, as well as being an experience-widening phenomenon, the result of an act of narrowing, of avoiding the wider perspectives which are barely comprehended or understood anyway. But this is just speculation about the mechanisms of lyric poetry: there is no doubt that the idea of sonder, an experience which derives from concentration, is an important issue in Frank’s poetics. It might, for example, be an issue lying at the heart of the concerns expressed in “Cathexis”, a bleak piece where poetry is seen as a protective force: “I seem to wrap words / around me as a form / of protection”.
There are many examples of the way the self lies behind the poems of natural description, but it lies behind other, quite different poems as well. “Empty in the Middle”, for example, begins with a crossword clue whose answer must be “hollow” and goes on to accumulate a long list of examples of hollowness:
The crossword clue is “empty in the middle” & I think of scattered thoughts & vacant heads, excavations in walls of rock & omissions in lists & spaced out summer days, of drained tanks & houses left when leases ended & tooth cavities & dents & dips & crazy ideas that invade your brain & the way sadness digs, digs, digs of beautiful items worth nothing at all & the indentations bodies make on pristine hotel sheets, of cardboard cutouts & troughs on the sea bed, of moon craters & potholes after the floods & dinosaur bones exhumed from the earth & plates licked clean, of apricot seeds gouged out & adumbral garden corners & vortexes in the air & memory lapses & a dearth of warmth on winter nights & my ancestors’ graves in Cyprus shade, of echoes in time & the rattling space you can feel around your heart when there is still a deep kind of yearning
Yes, hollowness recalls hollownesses in our knowledge – what we don’t know, again – but here it’s an emotional state and the fact that the poem ends with this makes this clear. There is also the intriguing tension in the poem in that structurally it is not itself empty. On the contrary it’s a packed list of examples. This might be a simple joke to help animate the poem, but it might also refer to the idea that emptiness accretes a baroque complexity around the edge: like the complex decorations around a doorway or the emissions at the boundary of a black hole.
At any rate, the point I want to make is that observations and comments in these poems are seen from a distinct point of view deriving from experiences which, as outsiders, we never fully understand. There is also, in the question of perspective, the matter of scale. The natural environment tends to be seen from the perspective of someone exposed to it or moving through it. As I said at the beginning, this is a self with a lot of baggage, it isn’t simply an accurately perceiving eye. We are never given a full account of the author’s emotional life – probably a good thing – but we are constantly reminded that this is a perceiving self whose past experiences involve a bit of damage and which make for a consistent perspective. It’s important for the structure of the poems that they range in scale of observation and are happy operating at the cosmic level. “Wandering Stars” begins, as many of the poems do, with a walk in the local environment, seeing such things as sunsets and mountains. But it quickly moves to wider perspectives:
. . . . . and as I walk I imagine the road spinning ahead, think about the wandering stars I heard about on a podcast when I couldn’t sleep, the ones expelled in a pinball game between galaxies People are a lot like stars – young or ancient - many of us hanging at the edge of an open cluster, shining in two directions and on nights when sleep won’t come I think of writers who built an eternity from it - Hemingway’s wild animals when vines claw against my white bedroom blind or Plath writing to the chink of milk bottles on her step
The cosmic perspective may have no more than metaphorical value here in a poem that probably should be slotted under the heading of “creativity” but it’s not atypical. One of the poems in Gardening on Mars that I like most is “Complication”. It begins with examples of what might be called intimate complexities: “understanding blood components / on a graph” and how they relate to things such as “the depth of your smile”. From there the poem moves out to the complexity of family relationships. It ends with another example of our lack of knowledge of what happens inside another person, before using a crossword example (the answer must be “astronomers” just as the answer to “empty in the middle” must be “hollow”) to move to cosmic perceptual inadequacies:
. . . . .
I’m reminded of the man
next door’s legs stuck
out from beneath his Holden
for years on end
(or so it seemed), even on
suffocating summer days
like this one when the train
timetable is a maze
and fourteen across is a deep
furrow in my day –
the clue is “stargazers”.
I’ll wait until the light fades
and navigate the galaxies
beyond the mango tree,
the nearest 4 light years
or 5.87 trillion miles
so what I’m seeing there
across this complicated gulf
of sky is decades old,
still childishly bright.
The second last line is crucial here. The images of the stars are not decades old, of course, they are tens of millions of years old. It’s the self which is decades old and still “childishly bright” so it is the self which is being observed despite the cosmic perspective. Something similar occurs in “Farsickness” (an imaginary complaint, one step from carsickness) where what seems like an addiction to complexities of cosmic distances – “Seventy sextillion stars are visible through a telescope. I think / about stars we will never be able to see . . .” – turns out to really be about “days when I can’t make everything fit”. Like “Empty in the Middle” it’s a poem of loss masquerading as a full list.
Another feature that relates to hollowness and its intellectual counterpart, ignorance, is the idea of creativity itself. If the general stance of the poet here is one of personal loss it does also generate two books of very fine poems, so there must be a positive. “View from the Spa” celebrates this positive. Floating in a outdoors spa on Fraser Island – that is, not grounded in the way that the walks involved in poems like “Mt Glorious on a Spring Afternoon That Felt Like Winter” or “Western Beach Walk” are – induces a state of near dissolution: “I am undetailed, undescribed, reshapeable, ripe for newness” which in turn leads to poetic creativity: “Ideas burst like fruit, like sky pineapples”. This sounds very much like Keats’s “negative capability” and the hollowness lamented and celebrated in so many of the poems may well be a state that makes the poems possible. So many of these poems work because of the balancing of tensions within them that it would be no surprise if the darker, personal story were not aligned with the enabling element of hollowness.
